Editing and redrafting Lesson 43 of the english course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 A first draft is like the first go at building a Lego model from your head: it stands up, but some bricks are in odd places, and editing is the second look that makes it sturdy and smart. 1 Editing means improving the writing (a stronger word, a clearer order, a missing sentence), while proofreading means hunting the small slips: spelling, punctuation and the tense that wandered from "went" to "go". 2 The best trick is to read your work aloud, even in a whisper: your ear trips over the gap where "the" is missing long before your eyes notice it. 3 Spellcheck and autocorrect are helpers, not editors: "The dog bark at the mail man" passes, because every word is a real word, yet "bark" should be "barked" and the reader still stumbles. 4 Upgrading words is good until it isn't: "He ambulated to the edifice" for "He walked to the building" sounds like a robot swallowed a dictionary; the goal is the right word, not the longest one. 5 A draft is a version of your writing that you plan to improve. 7 Reading your work aloud helps you hear missing words, clumsy sentences and tense slips. 8 Many schools use a special pen colour, often purple or green, for edits, so the teacher can see the improvements. 9 Crossing out and rewriting are a normal part of writing, not a sign of failure. 10 Professional authors usually rewrite their work many times before it is published. 11 Spellcheck cannot catch real words in the wrong place, such as "there" for "their" or "bark" for "barked". 12 A thesaurus gives words with similar meanings, but not every synonym fits the sentence or the reader. 13 Peer feedback means a classmate reads your work and suggests improvements; useful feedback is kind, specific and helpful. 14 By the end of primary school, pupils are expected to edit their own work without being told each mistake. 15 In Manchester "boss" means great and "nowt" means nothing; in Newcastle "pet" is a friendly word like "love". ← previous Building tension and suspensenext → Writing to inform, instruct and persuade↑ back to English This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/43-editing-and-redrafting/